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Guided Meditation: Flexibility

Welcome back. I'll be continuing the topic this week in the art of being nobody and somebody, looking at self and not-self in very practical means.

Many years ago, fairly soon after a two-week retreat, I found myself very stressed out working at the computer. It seemed that all the calm and clarity of the retreat had left. I was inspired to take on a daily practice at that time of doing walking meditation whenever I stood up from sitting, seeing how caught up I got, how my peace left so easily.

And so this is what I decided to do: every time I got up from sitting, I would just walk to my next activity. Whether it was to the bathroom or twenty feet to the kitchen, not for long, not slowly, not formally, but just completely disengaging from my thinking and walking with awareness.

I found there were so many opportunities to do this in my day—walking to the car, walking to the store. I got up a lot. And what surprised me the most was not the walking itself and how wonderful that was, but how challenging it was to let go of what I had been thinking about in order to actually arrive in the walking.

[Clears throat] My mind just wanted to continue doing whatever it was doing—to keep planning, problem-solving, rehearsing, remembering. It felt like a sacrifice to set my thoughts down. At times the clinging would feel desperate, but again and again, I just kept practicing, releasing the stream of thought and simply feeling the body walking, and regularly met resistance. It seemed it was so much easier on retreat or even in my daily meditation. But over time, something changed.

Letting go of the thinking no longer felt like such a loss. The mind became much more flexible, just less compelled to follow and finish every thread. I would feel like I had to finish that thought, no matter how trivial—I had to finish it. I became more willing to disengage from my thinking, to just drop it, to let it go.

What was interesting is that whenever I returned to my work, I felt more refreshed, more creative, more productive. And it's this flexibility of mind that I'd like to point to in this meditation this morning.

So let's begin.

Taking an alert and relaxed posture and gently closing our eyes. And very consciously putting aside any concerns we may have. Leaving later for later, arriving fully.

Settling in the body. You might allow the spine to rise with dignity, without any rigidity. Maybe like bamboo. Bamboo is strong, but it bends with the wind. It survives storms because it's so flexible.

See if the body can embody that quality now. Strong but not stiff, relaxed but not collapsed. Yielding, moving with every breath.

Taking a few slow, deep breaths. And with each exhale, relaxing a little bit more deeply, a little more settled.

And when you're ready, allowing the breath to return to its natural rhythm, allowing it to come and go just as it is. Feeling the body breathing. Gentle movements of expansion and release.

Perhaps noticing where the body might habitually tighten. See if there's any bracing. Maybe the jaw, the belly, the shoulders, the forehead, the hands. Allowing any of those areas to soften. Feeling any release, even slight bamboo in the wind.

A rigid tree may crack in the storm, but bamboo bends and returns. It's resilient because it's not brittle. Just resting in the rhythm of the breath.

Allowing any sensations, sounds, or thoughts to rise and pass away. Being flexible, allowing everything that arises to come and go without resistance. Just bending like the bamboo. Just hearing, feeling. Experience moving through awareness.

If any concerns or judgments arise, no need to reject them. See if they too can move like weather through an open sky, like wind through bamboo. Flexible, easy. No need to suppress them, no need to follow them. And when they pass, returning to this body, breathing again and again.

If at times the mind says, "I don't want this. I need this moment to be different," just recognizing the tension, the resistance, allowing a softening, a willingness to meet life just as it is, not how we want it to be. The bamboo doesn't argue with the wind in response.

Maybe feeling the body more globally now. Sensing it not as something solid or fixed, but as movement, sensation, flow, changing moment by moment. Breathing happening. Sensations coming and going, thoughts arising. No need to hold on to any of it.

Sometimes flexibility means yielding. Sometimes it means being more upright. Sometimes it means beginning again. The wisdom is in responding freshly to the moment, to this moment, this living moment, moving and changing on its own. This body breathing, here, now.

And as we near the end of the meditation, maybe taking a few deeper breaths, connecting with our posture, our body stable. Stable and relaxed, like bamboo, rooted in the earth. Open to the sky. Able to bend. Able to return.

It's wonderful to share the silence with you.

Dharmette: Being Somebody & Nobody (4 of 5): Responsibility without the Burden of Self

So this week, we've been exploring the activity of selfing, the comparing mind, and the ways a healthy functional self can serve us. And this morning I want to say a little bit about responsibility, because responsibility is one of the places where selfing can become very heavy.

All of us have responsibilities in our lives. Some we might choose, like our work, commitments, projects, relationships, or the homes we live in. And some responsibilities arrive whether we choose them or not: taxes, aging parents, illness, the body itself, and responding to unexpected crises.

It's interesting to contemplate that this body is not entirely ours. Scientists estimate that the body is 57% not human. It's just filled with trillions of bacteria and fungi. In many ways, we're more of an ecosystem than an individual.

So we're not this body, this face, not the roles we play—parent, child, teacher, spouse—they all go away. Not our passing mental states and emotions. Yet, even though they're not who we are, they still require care. The dharma doesn't negate these responsibilities, but it teaches us not to suffer while carrying what is in our hands, what's been given to us.

Sometimes responsibility can feel very heavy: "I'm the one who has to do this. It all depends on me. I can't fail." There's a tightening around it, a burden, a weight.

But there's a way that responsibility can become much simpler. It can just be responding to conditions. The child cries, we respond. The dog is hungry, we feed it. The body is tired, we rest. There's a puddle in the road, we walk around it. Responding is natural. It doesn't require creating a self around it.

If you lift weights at the gym, maybe many of you have some version of that. They tend to feel heavy, right? Lifting might be a little uncomfortable, though we might feel really good afterwards. But sometimes the idea of lifting weights feels even heavier before we even leave the house. The mind's resisting, dreading, complaining, "I don't feel like going."

And what it does is point to something very important: that often it's the idea of responsibility that becomes heavier than the responsibility itself. It's like carrying the weights around all day instead of only lifting them when we're at the gym.

Responsibility may require effort, but psychologically carrying it all day long—that part is optional. The mind adds, "I have so much to do, so little time. I can't let people down. What if I fail?" Tying up our worth, our identity, all wrapped up into it. It's a lot to carry around. Often what exhausts us isn't the task itself; it's all the added meaning.

You know the Zen saying, "Chop wood, carry water." Meaning when you chop wood, just chop wood. In the same way, if we burn dinner, we burn dinner. We don't need to add layers of judgment: "I'm terrible. I should have been mindful. What kind of meditation teacher am I?" Maybe we just need something else.

The less added meaning we give to what we do, the lighter the task becomes. The more wholehearted we are, the lighter things can become.

About fifteen years ago, IMC^[1], Gil^[2], and a group of other people had been searching for a place to create the Insight Retreat Center. When we found this ten-room assisted living home in Santa Cruz, and before IMC bought it, Gil asked me if I could run the project. This was converting a ten-room facility into a forty-room retreat center with a meditation hall, a couple of acres to take care of, and helping establish all the systems to run it, including finding the volunteers to run it, as we didn't plan to have any paid employees.

I had absolutely no experience as a project manager. I didn't know how to organize things, and it was a huge responsibility. If I had fully thought it through and thought about everything involved, I probably would never have taken it on. But I connected with something else inside me. It gave me a deep and almost immediate, resonant "yes."

Over the years of developing the center and serving as managing director, I learned a lot about the art of picking things up and setting them down when they're no longer needed. I learned that when I'm done hammering, I don't have to carry the hammer around all day.

Whenever I imagined everything that still had to be done, it would feel like a weight descending on me. Hundreds of tasks, problems to solve, people to coordinate. But when I set down the idea of the whole thing and simply paid attention to what was next, what needed planning, there could actually be peacefulness, even joy. And then I had all the room to appreciate how much I was learning. I didn't know that much about electricity before. How wonderful the volunteers were, how meaningful it all was. It became a labor of love.

And that's a big part of the practice: learning the art of picking up and setting down, doing what's needed when it's needed, and not carrying it around with us. It's actually the art of non-clinging.

Part of wisdom, though, is knowing our capacity, and our capacity changes throughout life. Often, practice increases our inner capacity. And for some of us, aging and illness decrease our outer capacity at the same time. So our capacity changes. Part of responsibility is honestly reflecting: what is actually mine to carry? What is too much? What commitments are appropriate now?

Sometimes the wise thing is to simplify our lives, to say no, to do less. But sometimes reality simplifies our choices for us in ways we didn't plan. My sister-in-law finally retired, imagining a quiet, contemplative life doing yoga, but instead, she found herself raising a seven-year-old grandson. Life doesn't always ask for permission before giving us responsibilities.

But whether our lives are simple or full, they become lighter when we stop turning them into "me" and "mine."

Responsibility also includes a responsibility to ourselves, to our own practice, to our own hearts, to our own capacity. This practice is not about the perfection of self. The practice is the gradual release of clinging, the release of "me" and "mine." We might cultivate these wonderful qualities—we even call them the ten perfections^[3]: generosity, patience, loving-kindness, energy—but they're not about perfecting the self. They're about cultivating what allows us to gradually release the clinging.

And paradoxically, when there's less selfing, there's usually more natural care. There's a lot more responsiveness, more love, more service, without so much burden.

There's a beautiful quote by this wonderful Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore^[4]. He won the Nobel Prize for literature back in 1913.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Not burdened, not martyrdom. Just this life naturally responding to itself.

So thank you.

Q&A

I appreciate your comments. Oh, someone asked me to speak up. I'm so sorry you had trouble hearing me. I don't know if anybody else did. Sometimes as teachers, as we get mellow with our own guided meditations, our voices get a little bit lower.

Somebody's asking for the quote. I'll read it again just so you have that:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

It's Tagore. He wrote wonderful poetry.

Ah, very sweet. Someone wrote, "My father used that Tagore quote. He lived till 99." Very sweet.

The spelling is... let me see if there's... I've never actually responded in this chat, so I'm sure there's a way to write something, but I'm not sure how. His first name is Rabindranath Tagore. R-A-B-I-N-D-R-A-N-A-T-H Tagore.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for writing it down. I assume the name's Jamie Andrews. Thank you. Somebody even wrote it all out. Wonderful.

So, I'm going to log out. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.